


Age 17: Sam Vimes Jr has a drink

by catintheinfinite (michelle439731)



Series: A Difficult Age [4]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-18 23:36:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15497340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/michelle439731/pseuds/catintheinfinite
Summary: Is Sam Vimes Jr just like his dad?





	Age 17: Sam Vimes Jr has a drink

Sam lay in the cobbles and looked up at the stars.  The few that made it through the smog of inner city Ankh-Morkpork looked beautiful.  He had never really appreciated them before. That big one was his favorite. The big.  White. Circle. Moon! That was it. The moon was beautiful. It was fat. Full. New. No, that was for when it went away, this was an old moon.  Old and fat. Sam could see it through the smog. Smog...fog...bog..frog. 

Something else appeared in the night sky.  Was it another moon? How many moons did An-Moror have anyway...mooons.  Fat and old. Sam tried to focus but it was very hard. It seemed to swell and take up more of the night sky.  The new moon made some noises which sounded very loud so Sam closed his eyes protect his ears. And then opened them when he remembered it didn’t work like that.  It was already dark outside, why was the moon so loud.

He asked the moon, very politely, if she would grant him a wish.  Instead the moon yelled at him.

“What the hell are you doing lying in the in the middle of the street?”

“Moon.” Sam replied and pointed up.

“Have you been drinking?”

“Moon?”

“OK, let’s get you out the gutter and get you home.  You are lucky I know who you are otherwise you’d be in the drunk tank for the evening.”

Sam recognised the voice now and tipped his head against the shoulder once he was level with it.

“Moon,” Sam snuggled in, taking her hand.  Hand was warm and ground was cold. Why had he lay down again?  He had trouble remembering. He had wanted to see the stars better that was it!  The world spun a little but up was better, up was shoulders with Corporal Watt. Sam allowed himself to be lead away.

~~

It was the following morning and Sam was pretty sure that his dad wasn’t angry but his faculties hadn’t made it all the way up to one hundred percent yet so he might have been wrong.  

He didn’t have much of a  headache left from the drink last night.  He had been quite the worse for ware lying in the gutter and all but he remembered all of the evening.  At least he hoped he could remember all of the evening. He’d been out for a nineteenth birthday party for one of the Assassins who had graduated the previous year.  They had started at the Guild with some liquor which had been liberated from someone’s parents wine cellar. The group had moved on to a private members club. Sam had tried a very expensive (even for him) whiskey, which he had not been impressed by.  The rest of the crew kept insisting that it was the age not the taste that was to be appreciated. Sam had started making his way down the cocktail list instead. These were fruity and tangy and sour and sweet (and came with little umbrellas) and Sam had not realised that anything was happening until he tried to stand up and his legs politely told him to fuck off.

The group helped prop each other up and moved on to the next bar. And then the next.   It was in between one of these excursions into the cold night air between the smoky holes in the wall that Sam had decided he was done for the night and, without telling anyone, had wandered off to look at the moon.

Fortunately the moon had turned out to be Corporal Watt who had taken him home and dumped him in the kitchen.  She was in the process of filling the basin with ice water with which to dump over his sleeping body when Wilikins had materialised and taken the young master up to his bed.  Wilikins had filled Sam in on this earlier this morning when he had brought up a hangover remedy for the young master. Sam didn’t think Wilikins would have said anything to his dad but given how rotten he felt this morning it was probably perfectly obvious that he had drunk more than a glass of champagne as a toast.

Still, his dad didn’t look angry.  His mother had been angry. A sort of ‘I didn’t even know I should have been worried about you, what were you thinking’ kind of angry.  She had flitted around him, scolded him and then made sure he piled his plate high for breakfast. He, however, was not hungry.

“He’s mad at me isn’t he? I know he doesn’t drink but,” Sam poked at his breakfast with his fork.  Sam Vimes Sr had not gone spare, as had been the initial worry, but he had gone all stone-faced, which was never a good sign.  Sam was old enough to know the excuse ‘everyone does it’ wasn’t going to cut it but still, everyone did do it. It was just something that was done:  champagne at parties, beer in clubs, brandy in smoking rooms. Just because his father didn’t partake didn’t mean he couldn’t join in. Perhaps not as enthusiastically next time but wasn’t he was being taught to think for himself, to go out and make his own decisions.

Everyone else really was doing it.

“He’s not mad, he’s just concerned about you Sam.  You shouldn’t be drinking.”

“You drink.”

She looked at him and Sam felt himself skate out over very thin ice.  “I’ll get your father to talk to you.” 

Sam poked at his breakfast but he still wasn’t hungry.  He went back upstairs and saw his parents at the end of the hall having a very quiet discussion which stopped when he approached.  He could tell it was about him, they didn’t whisper about anything else.

His dad hugged his mum and walked towards him.  “Lets go for a walk.” Sam was swept up in his wake and followed him down the stairs and out the door.  Sam Vimes Sr still liked to walk around the city, the action helped him think and keep his finger on the pulse.  Sam was at least hopeful that this meant he wasn’t grounded. He was seventeen after all, and a man of the Disc but his father was Sir Samuel Vimes so anything was possible.

They walked a good long way in silence.  Sam had learned not to confess to anything while on these walks, his dad might sit in silence and wait for him to talk but Sam was quite prepared to wait to see where the conversation was pointed first.  He felt that this morning, he probably did have something to apologise for.

“I’m sorry about the drinking, and getting taken home by an officer.  It wasn’t very gentlemanly of me.” That was a good enough starter, he was sorry about the drinking.  He had known it was wrong but had got swept up with everyone else, all the upperclassmen were doing it.  Most were a lot drunker than he was, and it had taken a lot more alcohol for them to get there.

“It’s not that Sam.  Not the drinking so much as you being drunk.  It just scared me that’s all. Reminded me of when I used to drink.”

“You used to drink?”  Sam tried to imagine his dad drinking out of a martini or brandy glass, even now after  twenty years of living with his mother his dad still did not seem to fit in with everyone else this side of the Ankh.  Sam tried to imagine him with a glass of whiskey or even a beer and his brain just slid right over the image. “I can’t imagine you with a drink.”

“I drank whiskey, Bear Huggers.”

“Oh the boys passed round a bottle of that last night.  Fowl. Well most of it was fowl but Margaret mixed it with this fruit cocktail stuff and then it was ok.”  He saw the expression on his dads face. “I’m not going to do it again.”

“No, don’t promise me that.  Don’t say never again because you will drink again.  You should be able to have champagne at parties and celebrations, have a drink with your friends at the end of the week once you are older and in employment.  You should be able to enjoy your mother’s wine cellars.”

“They are yours too you know.”  Sam nudged him.

“That’s not the point.  You shouldn’t start drinking without knowing something first because you are my son.”

“Is this like the laws of intoxication behaviour or selling alcohol to minors.”  Sam wasn’t sure where the conversation was going. This wasn’t a ‘not under my roof’ but it didn’t seem to be a ‘when I was younger’ or ‘as commander of the watch’ speech either.

“I’m an alcoholic,” his father said.  His feet had stopped and he was looking at Sam.

“But you don’t drink.  Everyone knows that.”

“I’m still an alcoholic.   I can’t have one drink because if I have one I’ll have ten and it’ll still won’t be enough. My dad drank too.  That’s mostly what I remember about him. I remember my mum talking about him and what he was like. I saw you drunk last night and it just reminded me.”

His dad wouldn’t meet his eye.  Sam looked up. “Why are we at Small Gods?”

Sam Vimes Sr looked around, confused at his location, then his expression cleared.  His dad had been walking without thinking again and it had led him here. There was something inside that he wanted Sam to see.

“Come on, I want you to meet someone.” 

They walked among the headstones, passing the section for the Watch.   Sam had figured they had been on their way to meet some mentor figure but they kept going.  Neared the back it was cramped and the stones were piled up together and engraved with many names.   They stopped at a grave that looked just like the rest and whose markings were hardly visible under the wear of the stone.  His father would have had to know exactly where he was going because you could not tell by looking who was buried here.

“This is my mum,” said his dad, reaching out his fingers to lightly brush the stonework.  “Your forever hearing stories about Sybils forebears but I’m afraid this is it for me. Ma Vimes buried up in Small Gods.”  Vimes picked at some of the moss on the headstone. “I haven’t been here in a while.”

His dad went somewhere else in his head, Sam could tell.  He was glad he had been brought here, to see where his dad had come from.  Sam would have liked to have grandparents, most of the other boys had them, most of them had younger mothers and richer fathers.  That’s the way it went. 

His mother had taken him to the Ramkin crypts beneath Crundells.  They had a whole section in the local cemetery with plots of land for future Ramkins.  Apparently some folks had been concerned that she would be the last of the Ramkins but then along came Sam.

He thought about his family tree with all it’s generations on his mother’s side and the stumply little branch of his fathers.  Sure the Vimes name might have stretched all the way back to Stoneface cutting off the head of some king but this was the only other branch remembered on the Vimes side.  Sam stood very solemnly waiting for his dad to come back to himself.

Vimes touched the grave again, as if saying goodbye and turned back to his son.

“Thank you for showing me this,”  Sam said. “It was nice to meet her.”

“I didn’t start drinking, not properly, until after she died.  I knew what she thought about my own dads drinking and how it affected her.  Once she was gone though I just fell straight into it’s arms. I think it was the drink that killed my father.”

“You said he was run over by a cart.”

“Yes, perhaps, or he fell into the Ankh, or he just walked home the wrong way and got jumped in a back alley in the Shades.  I don’t remember, either way he would have been drunk. Mum told me it was the cart and I believed her. I saw you passed out on the kitchen table and it reminded me of him, of me.  You should know what me and my dad were like with the stuff. In case you were the same way.” Vimes put his hand over his face. “All you shall inherit from your mother and this is what you’ll get from me - an inability to say no to booze.  But you should know.”

Sam took his father’s hand away from his face and held it in his own, tugging him away from the grave and they walked back in the direction of home.


End file.
